Fending off the dark

I think -- and of course I am projecting here -- that many of us go through life a bit like this rower.  We understand that we are in a very small boat at the mercy of a very large sea, but we also postulate a number of hostile possibilities, and are constantly wary, on alert.

So rather than relax and enjoy it when the seas are calm, we are always on the lookout for impending danger, clutching the oars and ready to row away or hit out if necessary.

Of course, you say, he has to turn from time to time, to look where he is rowing.  But if we stay in that position, and do not turn our backs and trust, we can get painfully twisted.

The problem, I think, is that we understand at some deep level that life has its light and dark cycles, but we are so busy fending off the dark that we cannot relax and enjoy the light.  The more self-aware I become -- especially through the schoolwork I'm doing right now -- the more I realize how much time I spend braced against reality, against the possibility of failure, of weakness, of imperfection... and how, if I could but embrace the inevitability and relax into the dark instead of demonizing it, declaring it the enemy (can you hear echoes of yesterday's post here?) I could bring so much more to life.

David Whyte, in The Heart Aroused, puts it this way:

"We think we exist only when our life looks like the first half of the cycle, when our "moon" is waxing, when our sense of ourselves is growing and getting larger, when we are succeeding...If things are dying or falling away, we dismiss it, we refused to see it as the second half of the very same cycle and think there is something "wrong" with us.  We think something terrible has happened and we need to do a whole list of things to put it right.


Much of our stress and subsequent exhaustion...comes from our wish to keep ourselves at full luminescence all month, even when our interior "moon" may be just a sliver in the sky, or about to fade from sight altogether.  It takes tremendous energy to keep up a luminescent front when the interior surface is fading into darkness.  In some ways we are constantly preventing our own rebirth into new cycles and greater lives...

What would my life be like if I had as much faith in the parts of me that were fading away as I had in the parts of me that were growing?  Embracing loss, we begin to understand the necessity of failure, and in the possibility of failure begin to understand the magnificence of even the humblest human path...We come to accept that every one of us can fail, fail to live the life we desire for ourselves, or even fail to uncover the desire itself...


Releasing ourselves from the need to keep half of ourselves hidden, we can begin to bring these other neglected sides to light, to entertain the possibility that there is an integral wholeness to all the seemingly antagonistic and opposing sides of ourselves, a possibility that we may not have to be "fixed" or amended before we can serve."


I find these days that I am getting occasional glimpses of what that space might be like -- the space where everything that is is okay -- and I find it to be a source of energy and wonder, a place where I can breathe deeply, let my guard down, and be open and present to all that is.

You know -- I've lived in this spot, at the end of the Sandspit, for nine years now.  And it's only in the last 24 hours that I've noticed that one of those noises I hear every morning is the kingfisher chattering to his mate?  I know about the gulls, eagles, herons, ducks, geese and songbirds.  I know the kingfisher exists, and know the sound of his voice.  But I never realized what an important part he plays in my morning symphony.  You have to wonder -- what else am I missing?